DeepSouth

interesting, thanks for idea. 10% turnover, minor repurchases - can own in taxable account. 17% NAV discount with 4% dividend, decent long-term NAV capture/accretion. Reasonable 15% leverage. Blue chip value focused with 40%+ weight to BRK. 1% mgmt fee, certainly much higher than low cost ETFs but reasonable. Effectively kept up with large cap value index over 10 years

I took a position in BRW Q4 2022. Boaz is one of the better thinkers in fixed income and I am okay riding the jockey here. Also own Pershing Square, much different but bigger discount. Here's a good site to explore discounts, holdings, managers, expense ratios, etc through screeners. https://www.cefconnect.com/

CLOA: blackrock's new CLO AAA etf, maturities are longer but duration is ~zero, NAV will more around a bit but these facilities close to unbreakable, no AAA has ever missed a payment in the history of the asset class. yielding sofr+154.

You don't seem to understand how the rates or bond markets work. Maybe you won't buy treasuries at 1% but majority of $$$ are held by institutions with vastly different goals/priorities than you. Primary dealers are mandated to bid on treasury auctions. The Fed has many tools to control the yield curve as well. Inflation is plummeting.

Moved to west village last month. Close to zero listed inventory and 40-50 people touring per listing, so prices feel above 2019 levels. My sense is rent is still attractive in outer boroughs and commercial districts with high rise resi (midtown/fidi)

Most large deals in HY are heavily oversubscribed as people pad orders to drive up allocations. While you can tighten pricing after initial price talk once, generally frowned upon to do big move from original guidance. Lastly, the deal was likely reversed from several large accounts with some sort of pricing color attached, limiting the move from original talk.

If you're building a portfolio around what stocks work well with 10% interest rates, you are narrowing your universe down to a handful of companies that benefit from extreme moves in rates up and/or runaway inflation. Equities would likely reprice down materially to the 10% risk free rate, punishing valuations on great companies. So, you are making an explicit directional bet on an event that the market believes has very low probability. If that's your bet why not buy deep OTM interest rate options or leveraged futures position to get max direct exposure? They'll write a book about you if you're right.

Another interesting defi coin that can be analyzed fundamentally is MKR. My limited understanding is this is similar to an unregulated bank issuing their own stablecoin currency (DAI) for overcollateralized loans. There is discussion on the lack of diversification in collateral, shifting towards USDC. They do have some interesting early stage work in bringing real world assets on chain, which is certainly a very heavy lift, and creates more risk to liquidate assets, but a massive opportunity if successful. The recursive nature of Defi speculation is also a key risk in my opinion (does this have any current use other than leveraging/speculating on other coins of potentially dubious value?). DAI outstanding has 2X over past 3 months and 30X over the past year. Earnings flow partially into a surplus buffer (retained earnings) and into repurchasing and retiring/burning MKR tokens. At current run rate, the protocol is doing $143MM in profits, which equates to a 4%+ buyback yield. Not sure if I'm thinking about this correctly, but looks kind of like a 3% ROA ($143MM/$4,700MM), 357% ($143/$40MM) ROE bank (pre-loan losses I think, but overcollateralized on chain assets, rare to have losses), growing at a breakneck speed, and trading at low 20X P/E. https://makerburn.com/#/ Happy to be corrected if I'm off here. It's way outside of my traditional wheelhouse.

If you are willing to trust a 3rd party with API access to accounts/wallets, Cointracker.io is a great platform for cyrpto tax monitoring.

Abolishing slavery was discussed during the formation of the United States and was abolished in the UK in 1803. Half the country had already abolished it. I think someone in the US in 1840 who couldn't imagine slavery being abolished would simply be blind to the facts on the ground. I can imagine massive change. I can imagine 10 year old bitcoin surpassing 5,000 year old gold as a store of value. I can imagine life extension technology changing our view of mortality and humanity. And sure, I can imagine some revolution/depression in the US that destroys the country, the economy, and the USD, but that doesn't mean I think it's likely. And by looking at Japan's strong living standards despite very loose monetary policy for decades, I think it's clear that if anything takes down the US it won't likely be loose monetary policy. I'd argue it's the anarchists, austrians, and zero hedgers that are stuck to their priors/dreams of collapse. They've been saying that the US would collapse any day now since ~2007 and have been wrong despite crazy events like the GFC and a global pandemic. I view them like the doomsday cultists who claim the world will end on 1/1/2019, then simply change the date to 1/1/2022 instead of admitting they're wrong. I think the doomsday talk hurts incremental bitcoin adoption at this point. I'm not likely to see eye to eye with anarchists, so I'll leave it there. Apologies for getting frustrated.

I guess. You keep your dollars. I'll keep my BTC. The winner will have the satisfaction of knowing they were right. BTC is my largest position. I guess there's more than one way to skin a cat/come up with a bullish thesis on BTC. Then what is your point?!?!?! Series of events: 1) SD said USD isn't backed by anything - just like crypto 2) You took offense to that and pointed out that it's "backed" by the economy and demand by tax payers 3) I pointed out that has been the case for EVERY currency that has ever collapsed and doesn't seem to provide much support 4) You started personal attacks and questioning people's intelligence for not "getting" your argument and then admitted you own crypto anyways So what is your point? You haven't addressed any of the counterexamples other than to say "well they printed money" - we're doing that too BTW. Seems to me you have no substance to your posts and must just enjoy being rude and a troll Every individual source of demand "supports" the dollar. But there are also many countervailing forces that work against it. No one disagrees the USD would be worth less if it had no demand. I think we all understand it would be 0. So every use case supports the dollar value being somewhat above 0. But the USD still rises and falls in values and on a long-term scale has been only falling despite us having many more taxpayers today than in prior decades. So no - tax payer demand didn't provide support to the USD as it still has dramatically depreciated in value over the past 4 decades despite having more tax payers. Would it be lower without taxpayers? Sure. But that's not what any here has debated - we're not debating the incremental impact to every source of demand just to point out there are source of demand. We're talking about the overall value of it and that the overall value hasn't been backed by anything physical or well supported in absolute value terms. Now f*ck off. My original post: "If you are a US citizen or resident and don't pay your federal taxes in USD you go to prison. If you don't understand that this creates an attractive demand characteristic I don't know what to tell you." I've been saying that the USD has a support mechanism that BTC doesn't have. USD has a tax liability driven source of demand that BTC doesn't have. You have turned that simple and objectively true idea into a reason to screech about German fiscal policy from 100 years ago. I never said that USD has appreciated over time. You are fighting against the brain worms and voices in your head. In fact one of my earlier posts: "And I never said that USD has maintained its full value for 50 years. I said that taxation is a source of support." "So no - tax payer demand didn't provide support to the USD as it still has dramatically depreciated in value over the past 4 decades despite having more tax payers. Would it be lower without taxpayers? Sure." You contradict yourself at every turn. If the value would be lower without taxpayer, then taxpayers did provide support to the USD.

I guess. You keep your dollars. I'll keep my BTC. The winner will have the satisfaction of knowing they were right. BTC is my largest position. I guess there's more than one way to skin a cat/come up with a bullish thesis on BTC. Then what is your point?!?!?! Series of events: 1) SD said USD isn't backed by anything - just like crypto 2) You took offense to that and pointed out that it's "backed" by the economy and demand by tax payers 3) I pointed out that has been the case for EVERY currency that has ever collapsed and doesn't seem to provide much support 4) You started personal attacks and questioning people's intelligence for not "getting" your argument and then admitted you own crypto anyways So what is your point? You haven't addressed any of the counterexamples other than to say "well they printed money" - we're doing that too BTW. And you're trying to get us all to believe that tax base supports/backs the value of USD, and making the same argument in numerous posts, while dismissing all the countries where it DIDN'T really support the valuation and currencies went to 0 and then still saying you own crypto anyways. Seems to me you have no substance to your posts and must just enjoy being rude and a troll My point is that USD isn't worthless, we aren't Weimar Germany, and BTC proponents saying USD isn't backed by anything can hurt BTC's adoption because that's wrong and institutional investors could lump in rational BTC proponents with zero hedge cranks. My point is that taxation supports a currency's value by creating demand for USD to satisfy a tax liability and then removing USD from the economy. Bitcoin has no similar structure. Bitcoin is far more like gold than USD. Its demand is driven by a mutual delusion driven by human desire for scarce assets that can signal social status and/or store value. Bitcoin had attractive characteristics for a scarce store of value since day 1, it's the mutual delusion that is snow balling in a positive feedback loop driving higher price vs gold. Just as federal taxation (and tight monetary policy) supports currency value, federal spending and loose monetary policy weakens a currency's value. Weimar Germany government materially outspent their fiscal capacity in order to pay FX denominated liabilities to WWI victors. It's unusual enough in developed countries that people use the same 100 year old example over and over. I expect the US federal government and central bank to continue deficit spending and for central bank to keep rates low to drive aggregate demand higher to drive higher employment -> wage gains -> inflation -> investment -> productivity growth. If productivity growth can't keep up with nominal spending, uncomfortably high inflation could rear its head, which could lead government/central bank to raise taxes and rates to reduce aggregate spend, driving the USD higher. The USD and BTC can exist peacefully together, one as a sovereign currency that underpins the economy (as government spend and taxation is done with USD), and one as a non-productive store of value.

I guess. You keep your dollars. I'll keep my BTC. The winner will have the satisfaction of knowing they were right. BTC is my largest position. I guess there's more than one way to skin a cat/come up with a bullish thesis on BTC.

So you bought $100K in USD to pay taxes. That is a source of demand for USD. You buying those USD supports the value of USD. If there were no taxes, you wouldn't have bought those dollars to pay those taxes. Therefore tax collection supports/backs USD. It should be embarrassing not to grasp this. It's not that we don't grasp it. It's that none of us believe it supports the value of a currency. What do all of the countries who've had currencies collapsed have in common? They all collected taxes in those currencies. No one gave a shit that Zimbabweans or Germans paid taxes in their currencies - the currencies still went to 0. And this isn't me being hyperbolic and predicting Weimar in the US. Just pointing out that this argument is crap. It seems you can't grasp that there can be two countervailing forces where one is stronger than the other. Taxation supports the dollar. Creating new dollars weakens the dollar. Weimar Germany was creating far more $$$ than they were taxing. I think it's insane to think the dollar would have the same strength if there was no taxation. Literally nobody on this thread has made that argument. Me buying a candy bar supports the dollar, but you don't see me waiving a candy bar and saying "see! Dollar supported! It's backed by tangible value of this candy bar!" Do tdemand for dollars provide some support for the dollar? Yes. But your initial statement was that it "backs" the dollar i.e. there is fundamental support for the valuation of the dollar due to demand from taxes. All I've done is provided examples of countries who also had the same demand whose currencies collapsed to zero because that "backing" is a very shallow fork of value and support. Stop coming after people because you made a terrible argument. There is fundamental support for the valuation of the dollar due to demand from taxes. If this demand didn't exist the dollar would trade much lower. Your brain worms are preventing you from understanding the first principles of sovereign currencies and fiscal and monetary policy.

So you bought $100K in USD to pay taxes. That is a source of demand for USD. You buying those USD supports the value of USD. If there were no taxes, you wouldn't have bought those dollars to pay those taxes. Therefore tax collection supports/backs USD. It should be embarrassing not to grasp this. It's not that we don't grasp it. It's that none of us believe it supports the value of a currency. What do all of the countries who've had currencies collapsed have in common? They all collected taxes in those currencies. No one gave a shit that Zimbabweans or Germans paid taxes in their currencies - the currencies still went to 0. And this isn't me being hyperbolic and predicting Weimar in the US. Just pointing out that this argument is crap. It seems you can't grasp that there can be two countervailing forces where one is stronger than the other. Taxation supports the dollar. Creating new dollars weakens the dollar. Weimar Germany was creating far more $$$ than they were taxing. I think it's insane to think the dollar would have the same strength if there was no taxation.